Mary Sidney Herbert and the Reinvention of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia

Abstract

The beautiful 1593 folio edition of The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia has suffered more than any other version from the presuppositions governing the New Bibliography and the corresponding critical prejudices embedded in the New Criticism and all its successors. The shorthand way of describing the folio is to say that it grafts the ending of the Old Arcadia onto the New (1590) Arcadia, attempting to retain consistency by updating character names (the Old Arcadia’s Cleophila becomes Zelmane, Kerxenus becomes Kalender, and so on) and making a few other minor alterations, most notably reducing the suggestions of sexual activity among the princes and princesses. In the mid-twentieth century, C.S. Lewis argued that, despite its lack of unity, the 1593 Arcadia was nevertheless the Arcadia of “literary history” on which Sidney’s reputation must rest. The rough-hewn summary of plot elements lends itself to Lewis’s faint praise and to the critical aspersions cast on the 1593 folio: it is a “broken-backed” tale whose conclusion “answers not to its precedents” and, according to the back cover of the relatively popular Oxford Classics paperback edition of the Old Arcadia, is a “hybrid monster which Sidney himself never envisaged” whose unreadability is largely responsible for the waning of the Sidney reputation in literary history.¹